Cameron Collie, Australian entrepreneur, and owner of the Groggle domain name, has a fight on his hands against Google. The reason is the name of his company, and more specifically the domain name it is using.

Collie’s online service Groggle is about to launch after two years work. The name was chosen for two reasons. Firstly, Groggle is a service that allows you to find the cheapest prices on different alcoholic drinks in your local area, so Collie wanted a name that included the word “grog“. Secondly, his first choice of domain name was Grogger, but that has already been registered.

With Groggle chosen as the name, and all the relevant domain names registered, Collie went ahead with trademarking the name as well. But then he hit a rather large roadblock in the form of Google’s legal team. Now the search giant is demanding the Groggle domains be handed over to them and that Collie selects a new name for his online venture.

Collie does not see his company as a threat to Google, saying:

We want Google to reconsider and realise that we’re not a threat and never will be. We’re certainly not typosquatters – nobody’s going to type in Groggle thinking they’re going to reach Google, that’s just insane.

Google doesn’t agree, however, and clearly sees Groggle as “deceptively similar” to its own name. Collie now has a difficult choice to make: change his company name or fight Google in the courts.

It would be easy to jump to the conclusion that the domain name was chosen because it sounded like Google’s name. But in this case he does have a valid reason for using the word “grog”. It’s the last part of the name that makes it similar enough to put Google on alert.

It’s getting difficult to find short domain names now that fit your company and have all the top-level domains you want still available. This may not have been Collie’s first choice of name, but it may have also been his only choice. He has a clearly defined service that will use the name, and it is one that does not overlap with any of Google’s main services. Would he win in court? If he could show evidence of how the name was chosen, how the business venture has been planned out over the last two years, and no intent to encroach on Google’s business, then he may have a chance.

What I really don’t understand is why Google doesn’t block this from happening in the first place. Buying domains is not an expensive venture, so why hasn’t Google just bought up all the free domain names it believes are deceptively similar to its own name? Surely in the long run that would save them money on legal fees?